BUHAWI is kicking up a storm.
BUHAWI or tornado stands for “Building a Universal Mount for Heavy-Barrel Automated Weapon Integration”.
Designed for use aboard Philippine Navy ships, BUHAWI has applications for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, including the Army, Air Force and Navy and is potentially a dollar earner for the local armaments industry.
It was turned over to the Philippine Navy last May.
The P14 million development cost is worth it, compared to imported technologies that cost around P24 million. Mass production would further reduce the cost to P12 million, engineers at the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said.
The DOST expects that when BUHAWI is commercialized, initial adopters will be the Department of National Defense (DND) as well as the robotics and metals industries.
BUHAWI was developed by DOST’s Metals Industry Research and Development Center (MIRDC), the Mechatronics and Robotics Society of the Philippines (MRSP) — in partnership with the Philippine Navy’s Naval Research and Technology Development Center (NRTDC).
In the pilot stage of commercialization, the DOST will establish manufacturing standard processes for BUHAWI to gear up for its licensing to adopters and for its mass production.
It will be an opportunity to streamline the expertise of both manufacturers and end users. It may even lead to the export of defense products.
It’s a game changer for the Philippines which has been dependent on defense technologies developed abroad.
BUHAWI’s operation sequence — surveillance, target detection, identification and recognition, with tracking and engagement — is a result of rigid research and development (R&D), MIRDC engineers said.
Its high hit probability, along with the integration of a technology camera system, and optimization of industry 4.0 technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation and additive manufacturing, are results of the collaboration of individuals from different fields of expertise, according to Navy and MIRDC reliability and performance tests.
The product design and fabrication of the gun mount, as well as the design and development of the control system and integration of the mechanical and control systems of the gun mount — are all local. They include themotors, military gear cameras and other peripherals.
According to DOST’s Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD), which funded the first year of the project in 2018, BUHAWI was designed to improve the firepower capability of the Philippine Navy which took over funding the second year.
The BUHAWI project involved the design and development of an automated gun mount for Browning 0.50 Caliber Machine Gun. The idea was to fabricate a mechanical system for an automated gun mount and an automated control system for a 0.50 machine gun.
A series of land-based live test fires were conducted with Naval Sea System Command together with the NRTDC. BUHAWI was then field tested on the Navy’s Heracleo Alano patrol craft.
A series of sea trials in both day and night operations as well as in various sea conditions were conducted.
The NRTDC found the BUHAWI weapon system better in terms of accuracy compared to the other or similar weapon system the Navy has previously acquired. The plan now is to make BUHAWI a fixture on every compatible naval ship.
MIRDC made provisions for technical training on material identification, metal working processes, non-destructive testing, related technologies and programmable logic controller or PLC, the latter an industrial computer program for manufacturing processes such as assembly lines, machineries and robotic devices.
